21/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Inadelso Cossa’s documentary-fiction hybrid is a sensory immersion into the memories, silences and traumas left by the civil war in Mozambique

The devastation wrought by war does not affect only the population or physical spaces destroyed at the time — its effect lingers in everything that survives, forever altering the atmosphere of a place, the dynamics between people and within their own selves, the very fabric of a society. Besides the mention of some remaining landmines in the bushes, war is largely invisible in Berlinale Forum title The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, the second feature from Mozambican director Inadelso Cossa. Yet its echoes are felt everywhere, inescapable reminders of what took place but also of the futures that could have been.

Opening with footage from before the civil war in Mozambique, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, the film is from the start a sensorial experience. Sound and image prickle the skin and the mind, inviting viewers into an open, sensitive, and attentive mode of film watching. It’s a mood that befits the ideas and concerns that Cossa makes explicit through his conversations with relatives in his native village, but also with his boom operator, Moises (Moises Langa). Appearing in the film himself, in conversations with the crewmember that are obviously staged and rehearsed, Cossa does not so much blur the boundary between fiction and reality as point out just how personal this all is for him — how even behind a camera, these sensations, memories, and questions are things he cannot escape. Even in fiction, they seep in from all sides.

The result is a highly personal and evocative film, dispensing key historical and factual information in an organic manner that does not interrupt the flow of sensory experience, but instead reveals the source of tensions already communicated through precise camera and editing choice. Early sequences shot in the village at night, with only the sounds of insects piercing the profound darkness, already hum with a sense of expectation, a low-level fear, a certain bitterness — imbued by the director’s filmmaking choices, but also perhaps by his grandmother’s attitude in interviews, her faraway look and vague recollections, the few words she chooses to talk about her husband. We only later learn that he was killed during the war, but in some way it feels like we already knew. Cossa in voiceover talks about his own memories from his childhood when he would visit the village during the holidays, including a particularly striking episode when his grandmother told him sounds of gunfire were simply fireworks. Now returning to the village armed with his camera and microphone, he faces up to these nagging ghosts and ominous impressions, asking the old woman directly about her past and his own family. Other villagers also open up to him, revealing one key yet hidden dynamic behind the strange local ambience: some of the people there are former rebels, now living in the same village as their victims. When Cossa films one such man and his partner, it is impossible not to see — in the stranger’s inability to stay still, his near constant chatter, and later his sudden and extended departure from the home — the signs of a person still affected by what he might have seen and done.

Punctuating the film with simple, beautifully composed inserts of old family pictures placed among the greenery, Cossa recreates for the viewer the terrible feeling of forever being haunted by those who are not just gone, but who should be here today. He makes us understand the pain of always wondering how different a place might have been, or what it would be like if your relatives, their friends, and their neighbours were not broken.

The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder was produced by Cossa’s 16mm filmes (Mozambique), IDA.IDA. (France), and Kaske Film (Germany), in co-production with BALDR Film (the Netherlands), DuplaCena (Portugal), STÆR (Norway), and Filmreaktor (Norway). International sales are handled by Syndicado Film Sales (Canada).